Real Sunken Cities

Natural coastal erosion is a long-standing problem in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom, especially on sandy shorelines. But climate change is generally expected to bring more of the severe storms that can tear off whole chunks of the coast at once. Rising sea levels, too, mean the waves during those storms can reach farther inland, eating the shore away faster. “Climate change has the potential to make an existing problem worse,” Dawson says.

When intense storms pummel the coasts, they often lay bare structures—like those at Meur—that were previously hidden. The earth here is densely layered with history. Generations of cultures—Picts, Gaels, Scots, Vikings—built on the same sites. “Also, people are throwing their rubbish around; that helps to make the sites build up,” Dawson says. Eventually, though, the long-abandoned homes were buried by sand. When a storm tears the coastline away, it reveals those ancient layers as if someone has opened up a dollhouse.

Dawson describes one site in the Shetland Islands, northeast of Orkney, where a cliff face recently tore away to reveal a large Iron Age tower called a broch. Until then, archaeologists were fairly sure they knew the whereabouts of all of Scotland’s brochs. Now, they’re trying to learn all they can about the newly discovered broch before it becomes the next casualty of a storm.